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Comedian Joan Rivers has died at age 81, a week after a routine procedure went awry.
She performed in three Broadway shows — and wrote two of them. “Acting is my true love. I would like to have been a serious actor, and I plan to in the next life. I’m going to be Meryl Streep Rivers.”

There’s nothing like Broadway at night, and I try to go to Mamma Mia! if possible, because I like to watch 15,000 Japanese tourists in the audience trying to sing “Waterloo.” If you don’t go to Broadway, you’re a fool. On Broadway, off Broadway, above Broadway, below Broadway, go! Don’t tell me there isn’t something wonderful playing. If I’m home in New York at night, I’m either at a Broadway or an Off Broadway show. We’re in the theater capital of the world, and if you don’t get it, you’re an idiot.

Come in a wheelchair, and they’ll put you in an aisle. I know how to get around New York! A wheelchair will always get you a good seat. And the cast will come out to you to say hello if you’re in a wheelchair. You don’t have to go backstage. If you need a wheelchair, I usually just push a handicapped person out of one. And I love to hang around the Broadway area, because I offer the cops 50 bucks. If you offer a policeman 50 bucks, he will stop and frisk you.

More than a decade ago, A.R. Gurney, who had written some forty plays over forty years, wondered whether he would be forced to retire. “I thought I had told the world everything I wanted to tell the world.” But even when he did finally come up with a new idea, he couldn’t find a producer or theater interested in it. Now, at age eighty-three, Gurney has shows in both the new Broadway season, and the new Off-Broadway season. Revivals of two of his plays open within the next two weeks—Love Letters on Broadway, and Wayside Motor Inn Off-Broadway. He has become a playwright-in-residence at the Signature Theatre, which has committed to two more of his plays, including a new one entitled Love and Money.

he four busboys who work in the kitchen of a tony Upper East Side restaurant in the well-acted, superbly directed new play by Elizabeth Irwin, “My Manana Comes,” bring home a cruel irony of the $30 billion New York City restaurant industry that employs about one out of every 10 New Yorkers: Many restaurant workers can barely afford to feed themselves… “My Manana Comes,” produced by the Playwrights Realm theater company at the Peter Sharp Theater, is no didactic tract on the exploitation of restaurant workers. It is a spot-on recreation of the “back of house” of a fancy restaurant.

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Ron Shelton of Bull Durham the musical, now in previews @alliancetheatre “Broadway is obviously everyone’s goal & intention,” “There’s no musical-theater equivalent for the closeup in a movie…That has to become a scene with a song.